Affiliate Marketing Angles: A Step-by-step Guide to Standing Out

Angles are the binding force of affiliate marketing. They’re how you make people connect with the campaign that you’re promoting.

Without an effective angle you’re just blindly promoting that offer.

If you’re thinking you’ll generate conversions just because you have a traffic source and a decent looking landing page, then you’re going to be disappointed. Populating that landing page, ads, and other creatives with disjointed content in hopes of obtaining leads just isn’t going work.

Promoting an offer in a way that’s clear, cohesive, and unique is how you’ll truly entice users to engage.

To accomplish this, you’ll need to come up with an attractive angle.

Think of an angle as the overarching “story” of what it is you’re promoting. It’s a similar concept to what every big-name brand tries to do in mainstream advertising.

If a burger chain only ran commercials with a message of “Our burgers are good.”, it’s unlikely that those ads would entice people to come in to their restaurants. Instead of a generalized sales ploy, they’ll focus on something that their audience is more likely to care about, for example:

Never using frozen ingredients

Only using AAA grade beef

Offering healthy alternatives

The same idea applies to affiliates marketing – A targeted angle is crucial for success and will provide you with several individual benefits:

Direction

Developing an angle will make the process of writing copy for ads and landing pages as well as choosing images for creatives more focused. The angle will become your framework that dictates what you’re communicating with your creatives. This allows you to stay focused on a single idea which will speed up any writing you’re doing while increasing the chances of your content resonating with users.

Purpose

Obviously, the end goal of promoting any offer is obtaining conversions, but an angle also provides you with a supplementary objective that can assist in obtaining those conversions. Your goal shifts to making a user feel a specific way about what it is you’re promoting so that they purchase that skin cream, try that online dating app, or enter that contest.

Differentiation

A creative angle will allow you to stand out from other affiliates promoting offers in the same niche with the same traffic source. Basing your creatives around a completely unique angle that speaks to a specific demographic of users will help you overcome the obstacle of over saturation.

Now that you understand the benefits of a great angles and why you need them to be successful in affiliate marketing, we’re going to take you through the process of creating them.

How to Produce Engaging Angles

There’s no mandatory linear progression for coming up with an angle, but there are two slightly different processes that we suggest you follow. The only difference between them is how initially committed you are to a single offer or niche.

If you’re starting completely from scratch, use Process 1. If you already know your niche or the offer you’d like to promote, (perhaps you already have a website focusing on a specific niche) then use Process 2.

Below we’re going to go through Process 1, step-by-step, from selecting a niche to testing creatives.

1. Choose Your Niche

You can create engaging angles for any niche in affiliate marketing. Some may be more difficult than others, but none are impossible.

When choosing a niche, it can be beneficial to explore one that you’re already familiar with or passionate about. This can give you an advantage over other affiliates with no prior knowledge because you’ll have a better understanding of the products/service you’re promoting and what people find appealing.

Let’s use weight loss as the example niche – a popular albeit saturated niche.

2. Choose and Research A Demographic

This is where you’ll make your niche more detailed and specific. Deciding who you’re going to be tailoring your weight loss angle towards will also largely dictate what it is you’ll be communicating.

Your messaging will change drastically depending on your target demographic. That’s why it’s important to do significant research to gain a better idea of what appeals to who if you don’t have much experience promoting within a specific niche.

Here are a couple of examples:

Gender

Men and women don’t store fat the same way. Womentypically store a higher percentage of fat in the lower body where men store their fat in the upper body or abdomen. This means their insecurities, desires, and motives are different. Integrating facts like this into your angle will improve your chances of appealing to your target.

Age

Someone in their 20s is going to have different motivation for losing weight than someone in their 60s.

A 25 year-old is more likely to care about obtaining a healthier looking appearance so that the opposite sex may find them more desirable. However, a 65 year-old is more likely to be focused on improving and maintaining their health.

Let’s focus on young to middle-aged females. This means our niche is now female weight loss.

3. Brainstorm. Then Brainstorm Some More

This is the step where you’ll come up with the actual angle for your niche, but don’t just run with the first idea that enters your brain. Take some time to brainstorm multiple angles that you think make sense with the niche and demographic you’ve chosen.

Here are a few tips that will help you out if you find yourself just staring at a blank piece of paper or computer screen.

Utilize and/or continue to do more research on your niche and demographic

Think of current/relevant events happening in the world. (This can include holidays, seasons, fads, trends, etc.)

Put yourself in their shoes. Try your best to think like the person you’re targeting. For female weight loss, you must think of something that’s going to resonate with a woman wanting to lose weight. A few ideas could be:

Lowering dress size

Losing post-pregnancy weight

Getting in shape for their wedding

Improving cardiovascular health

Losing belly fat for bikini season

Let’s say by utilizing the steps above you’ve decided on an angle of targeting engaged females prior to their wedding/wedding season.

4. Choose your Offer

As we mentioned before, choosing an offer can alternatively be your first step. Either your angle is going to determine the offer you’re choosing, or the offer you want to promote is going to reflect your angle.

If you’re a MaxBounty affiliate, you can easily filter offers by verticals. For our angle we’re going to want to look in the Diet sub-category of the Heath category.

We mentioned in the previous step that considering current trends can strengthen your angle, and you can apply that to choosing an offer as well.

So what’s hot right now in the diet community? Ketosis(keto) diets.

Data retrieved from Google Trends

Therefore, MaxBounty’sKETO Weight Loss ($68 CPA) could be a good fit for this angle. The landing pages and creatives are female targeted, and the messaging focuses on burning fat FAST, something that would likely be important to a woman whose wedding is approaching quickly.

5. Populate Creatives

Now that you’ve fully fleshed out your angle, it’s time to start integrating it into your ads, landing pages, website, or whatever other creatives you utilize with your traffic source. For all of the following elements, it’s important to come up with multiple ideas. This will be useful when you reach the testing stage of this process.

Headlines

Your headline has two objectives:

Catch the attention of a user

Persuade them to click on your ad and continue reading

To accomplish this, your headline needs to personally connect with the person reading it. Take your angle and make it appeal to someone’s self-interest.

Here’s a few headline examples that would target self-interest for this angle:

Get Your Wedding Ready Body With This Keto Diet

Say I Do to Your Dream Wedding Dress

Brides-to-be: Eliminate Belly Fat in Just 3 months

Make Your Dream Bride Belly a Reality

Copy

When writing any long-form copy with the purpose of selling the product or service you’re promoting, it’s important to focus on the benefits of the offer rather than the features.

You want to communicate how the KETO diet pills are going to make women feel and look beautiful on their wedding day because they’ll be in the best shape of their life. You won’t achieve the same impact if you’re simply telling them that this supplement will help them lose fat.

This is your chance to really sell your angle. Talk TO the user, and remember to build your messaging around your angle.

If you’re using ads to promote an offer, images are often the element that introduces your entire sales path to the user.

For your ‘brides to be’ angle, you’re obviously going to want to communicate the idea of getting in shape for an upcoming wedding. Pictures of fit brides and before and after bride photos would be a couple of good photo ideas to test out. Even if their similar, having a multitude of images will be useful when you get to the testing stage.

Call-to-action

It’s important that your call-to-action is simple and clear. Don’t be afraid to tell the user what you want them to do.

This is your last chance to persuade the user, so be direct, and don’t be afraid to feature multiple CTA’s throughout a landing page. (eg. Start transforming/burning fat now, Get Your Dream Bride Belly Now.)

6. Test and Alter

Testing may be the most important part of the angle developing process. It’s crucial to determine whether your angle is any good before you blow your entire budget on acquiring traffic.

We mentioned in the last step how you’ll need to produce a variety of creative elements for testing. This is where you’ll utilize those.

For example, let’s say that you’ve decided that you’re going to use Facebook ads as your traffic source for promoting KETO Weight Loss. You’ll want to make several ads that all present your angle in a different way and test them to see what garners a better click-through rate.

Here’s a list of things you should consider testing:

Headlines and/or imagery on ads and landing page

Direct linking vs using a landing page

Running a different campaign in the same niche

Trying a different traffic source

Adjusting your targeting parameters

Bidding on different keywords

Effective testing will allow you to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. It’s an important task that’s required in all facets of affiliate marketing but is especially pivotal for finding a great angle.

Conclusion

A captivating angle can be the difference maker between success and failure. However, there’s no secret formula that’s going to guarantee that each one you come up with will propel your affiliate earnings.

Follow the steps above to increase your chances of coming up with one that works, and continue to tweak your brainstorming techniques to improve your efficiency for thinking of new ones.

This is one of the most fun and creative tasks in affiliate marketing. Embrace and master the process.

About

MaxBounty is a world leading performance-based CPA network that specializes in maximizing the ROI of our clients. We aim to anticipate, evolve, and think one step ahead of the industry, ensuring that those who work with us do the same.

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About mThink

mThink is a specialist digital marketing company based in San Francisco. We focus on media buying, Facebook marketing, direct response, social and mobile. In addition mThink produces the annual Blue Book Rankings of major performance marketing networks.
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